Batman had it all wrong.
We love Batman, because he goes out and beats up bad guys on the weekends. Bruce Wayne spends all week working at Wayne Enterprises, or lavishly partying at the Gotham City hotspots. But none of us care all that much about Bruce Wayne. We care about Batman. Because of the fantastical things that Bruce Wayne does in his spare time in the evenings, we know him primarily as Batman.
The series is called The Adventures of Batman, not The Life of Bruce Wayne.
Bruce Wayne holds the reigns of Wayne Enterprises, a massive company with so many assets and so much liquidity, that he can launch a high-tech, multi-million dollar, military campaign to beat up psycho bad guys on the weekends… and nobody notices.
Why does no one ask about the millions of dollars of corporate excess funneled into this militaristic campaign against the violent and mentally ill people of the Narrows? Why does no one wonder why the money is not instead spent on programs to help at-risk youth, cultivate sustainable community development efforts, or to provide job training to ex-convicts?
I think the reasons are twofold.
First, deep in our bones, the myth of redemptive violence makes a comfortable home. If done in the name of “justice,” beating people up and busting heads is a good in and of itself. Reconciliation and redemption of broken people are irrelevant. The only way to redeem bad people is to lock them up like animals, or kill them.
Secondly, most of us have bought into the Batman delusion.
If a man attends a church service once a week and helps out with the “Feed the Poor” ministry of his church on Thursday nights, do those acts define who he is? With only this information, we would say he is probably a kind-hearted person with a sincere love for the poor.
If that same person spends all week running a company that exploits its workers, knowingly sells faulty products, and drastically damages the ecosystems directly surrounding its factories, would you still feel the same about that person?
The problem is that most of us live our lives this way. We do one or two things a week that firmly resonate with our values and beliefs, and therefore imagine that we are the people that we believe we are. We affirm love and kindness, and a few loving and kind acts a week help us convince ourselves that we are truly loving and kind people. The other 98% of our week is irrelevant to our defining of ourselves.
Many of us have bought into the lie that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” But this couldn’t be further from the truth. If our beliefs, thoughts, motivations, feelings, and passions do not look at all like our material reality, then all of that stuff “on the inside” is a load of Crap. The coffee that we drink and the clothes that we wear are far more definitive statements about us than our beliefs about fair-trade and sweatshops.
It’s what’s on the outside that matters.
We can all come together and communally assert that money doesn’t buy happiness, a bigger home won’t make us better people, and that nicer cars won’t make us more attractive. But do our actions really reflect that? Do our spending habits and financial aspirations truly represent those ideological assertions?
Consequently, Sunday morning services and Thursday evening charity are steps in the exact wrong direction. Many of us think that a few kind deeds are better than none. But maybe those kind deeds are the very things that relieve just enough pressure to keep us in our duplicitous lifestyle, still believing in things that we don’t believe in. Since those deeds keep us convinced that we are who we aren’t, perhaps they are the very things that we need to be stripped of in order to come to grips with the inconvenient and painful reality of who we really are. Devoid of any redemptive activity, maybe we would then find that we can’t live with ourselves and be forced to change.
So even though Batman spends his weekends fighting for justice and seeking peace (painfully misguided in his methods), he still has to face up to the reality that he is Bruce Wayne. He is not who he thinks he is.
We are not who we think we are.
If our pious activities do no more than relieve enough pressure to keep our false life afloat, maybe we should give up on those pious activities to save ourselves from an unknowingly duplicitous life. I prefer to hope in a new kind of spiritual community that can form new spiritual disciplines that make us come face to face with the reality of who we are.
The Church of Bruce Wayne. Not the Church of Batman.
Admittedly, I am no Batman expert. So if I am not doing justice to Batman’s philanthropic efforts, I apologize.
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